Bodies and Sole (20 page)

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Vera Gloom's sour face greeted Jamieson at the door. She
stood, a block of inhospitability, smack in the opening, her every gesture and facial expression unwelcoming, designed to send her visitor away.

Jamieson. In full uniform. With serious intent.

No niceties.

“Vera Gloom?”

“You know I'm Vera Gloom. Now get on with it.”

“Vera Gloom, I am arresting you on suspicion of murder and attempted murder.”

Jamieson had her handcuffs with her. Did you use handcuffs on an old lady? She'd never arrested a senior before.

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“I should warn you of your right to remain silent until you have a lawyer.”

“Lawyer? For what? Nursing old men in their final days? Is that a crime?”

“It could be. Especially nursing them, marrying them and killing them.”

“Every one of them would tell you…will tell you…that I have been a blessing in his life.” Vera's expression softened for a moment, the glimmer of a smile passed across her mouth.

“A blessing, yes, that is what I have been, a blessing.”

Her eyes hardened, the smile turned into a thin line of hate.

“Come. Let's go ask them. They'll tell you.”

Vera whirled around and began to march up the stairs.

Jamieson hadn't moved, trying to digest what Vera had said, what Vera apparently believed. That the men upstairs were alive.

“They can't tell me anything. They're dead, Mrs. Gloom. That's why I'm here. I have a warrant for your arrest on suspicion of murdering all three of your ex…late…husbands, and attempting to murder the one downstairs.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Money. Investments. Pensions.”

Vera turned.

“What grounds have you?”

“For one thing, arsenic in your well water. Of which you were aware. Contaminated water used to make Jello for your husband.”

Vera's eyes opened in wide innocence.

“But the water was boiled.”

“That doesn't remove arsenic.”

Vera's eyes opened wider.

“It doesn't?”

“I think you know that.”

Vera's resolve appeared to be coming undone. The grim line of hate was unbuckling, the expression in her eyes had become difficult to read because they were darting about wildly, focusing in no particular direction.

“Well, are you coming? They'll be waiting. They don't like me to keep them waiting.”

Vera's hands clenched together. Her fingers were fussing with her rings. She looked down at them. She focused on the largest, bluest diamond.

“Willard.” She was speaking to the ring. “Where are you when I need you, my darling. I have carried you with me all these years. We have never been apart.”

Her attention shifted to the ring beside it – also a blue diamond, slightly smaller.

“And Archie, you and I have travelled a long road together.” She lifted her hand and kissed the ring.

Jamieson thought it odd, but not unusual. Hy would have been fascinated because of what she knew about the blue diamonds. All Jamieson could conclude was that there had been perhaps two more husbands.

Dead husbands.

But she couldn't know they'd become diamonds.

Vera held out her hand. She flashed the rings in front of Jamieson, twirled them around.

“Meet my husbands, Willard and Archie.” She stroked the rings, and tears slid from her eyes.

Mad. She's mad.
This added new complications to the arrest. She might have to use handcuffs on this senior.

“But come. Come and meet the other boys.”

Jamieson stepped forward, took hold of the banister and began to climb the stairs. Vera turned and went ahead.

And then stopped. Climbed a few more steps. Stopped.

Jamieson had almost caught up with her. Vera reached the last step. Turned to face Jamieson with that same uncompromising expression. An expression that became a grimace. Vera clutched at the banister. Doubled over. Looked up at Jamieson, an appeal in her eyes, agony etched across her face.

Jamieson flew the two steps between them, and caught Vera just as she lost her grip on the rail and fell forward. Vera wasn't heavy, but she hit Jamieson like a dead weight.

For a moment Jamieson hesitated between carrying Vera upstairs – the landing was closer – or downstairs. She picked her up and took her downstairs. She carried her into the room where Cyril was living and dying, and laid her on the couch.

She felt for a pulse. In the wrist. On the neck. No pulse. She placed a hand in front of Vera's open mouth. She felt no breath. She pulled her onto the floor and began to administer CPR. At the same time, she fumbled in her pocket for her cell phone and put in a call to Nathan. She knew she'd get a far more immediate response from him than calling 911, miles away in Winterside.

He arrived minutes later.

“Vera. Vera.” He kept saying her name as he administered CPR. He used the defibrillator, worked on her for nearly an hour, as if she were a precious member of his family, not a nasty old bag of bones and a murderess.

Finally, he looked up at Jamieson, and shook his head. He closed Vera's eyes and went to back up his van right to the front door. He and Jamieson carried Vera out on a stretcher. It wasn't difficult. She weighed very little. As they lifted the stretcher to put her in the van, one of her arms fell to the side.

Her body was cold, and the cold and the jarring made the rings on her fingers loosen. Two blue diamond rings fell to the ground and rolled into a corner of the doorjamb. Neither Nathan nor Jamieson noticed.

With a grim look, Nathan secured the stretcher in the back of the van and was just about to take off when Jamieson stopped him.

“You better take him, too.”

“Him?”

Jamieson jerked her head toward the house. “Lover boy. You transported him out here, didn't you?”

Nathan jumped down from the cab of the van.

“Oh, him.”

“He can't look after himself. He's probably dying.”
Poisoned?
“We better get him some care.”

Cyril lay in the front room, where he had been spending his last days. He had slept through the drama with Vera, and he continued to sleep as they transported him out on the second stretcher and slid him inside the van next to Vera. His wife. In name and bank account only.

So it was that a scant few weeks after Nathan had delivered the new Mr. and Mrs. to The Shores, he was taking them away. One to the morgue. The other to the hospital. But likely not long for this world either.

United in life…reunited in death? Hubby didn't look as if he would make it all the way to Winterside.

He didn't.

Murder? Maybe. But what did it really matter anymore? No one would swing for it. Startled, Jamieson realized what that actually meant. At one time, Vera could have been hanged for her crimes. Now, if she'd lived to face justice, she might not even have spent the rest of her life in jail. Canada's hangman had been pensioned off before Vera was born. Otherwise, she might have picked him for her next husband, Jamieson thought.

It preyed upon Jamieson, the deaths of Vera Gloom and her husband Cyril. Had she caused Vera's death by shocking her with the arrest? That's what it had seemed like. And could she have prevented Cyril's? Perhaps, if she had listened to Hy sooner, but there had been no legal basis on which to make a move. Still, it nagged at her.

When she wasn't chewing on those worries, Jamieson was wondering what to do with the bodies. They couldn't continue to occupy the house. They couldn't stay at The Shores. Jamieson had no idea what to do with them. Would murder charges be laid against an old woman now dead? They should be. But what about evidence? Where would the bodies be stored?

The detachment had no interest in storing the cadavers. There simply wasn't space in the evidence room, and even if they could be squeezed in, they'd be constantly in the way and be damaged, get bits nicked off them. Lose an arm like the Venus de Milo?

The dilemma had been considered at the highest levels.

Jamieson finally got a call from Superintendent Constable. He was going to come out to inspect the situation.

He came the following day. The last time he'd been to The Shores, he'd been chased away by the unusual phenomenon of snakes falling from the sky. Terrified, he'd ordered Jamieson to take care of it, jumped in his car and sped off. This time, he darted several cautionary glances skyward as he sprinted from his car into the Sullivan house.

When Jamieson took him up to the second floor, he was appalled. He had been curious, but the superintendent was squeamish. He only got as far as Blair before losing the battle with his own terrified sense of mortality.

“I've seen enough,” he managed through a wave of nausea. “You'll have to leave them where they are for now,” he decreed.

He had nothing more to offer before he scuttled back to his car, took off with a vehemence that suggested the plastic beings might be pursuing him, and ignored the speed limit in his haste to get back to the relative safety of his office and paperwork, too dull to kill a man.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Jamieson shifted her obsession with her possible responsibility in the deaths of Vera and Cyril to the continued presence of the bodies just down the hill. She wasn't a religious woman, but she was a superstitious one, and she felt something should be done. What, she didn't know. Why, she didn't know that either.

She burst into Gus's kitchen when she could no longer stand her own thoughts about the bodies. As often was the case, Hy, Finn and Dot were having tea with Gus.

“What are we going to do about those bodies?”

“What do you think, on display at the hall, maybe?” Hy suggested. Dot grinned. So did Gus.

“I could curate it,” said Finn.

“Perfect.”

“I'm serious.”

“Well, if you're serious, I'd get Lili to take a look at them.”

“Lili? What could she do?”

“Calm your mind.”

Hy was right, thought Jamieson. She needed to calm her mind. She went looking for Lili.

No one except Nathan had noticed that Lili had not gone by the Sullivan house all summer. She took the county line road out of the village and back along a rutty red clay road – halfway to Winterside and back – just to get to the hall.

She had never liked the house, and she liked it less now.

“I sense the aura of evil.”

The aura of evil, thought Hy, who had come along for the “exorcism.”

There were bodies, but were there souls?

Lili claimed if there were she could sense them.

Jamieson had scoffed at the idea.

But then Jamieson had also scoffed at the idea that Lili could move objects with her mind. Until she had moved a wooden table with a thought. Played the piano by just thinking about it – and helped to solve a case of mind over murder a few years back.

Could Lili sense souls? And what if she could?

Did it matter if these bodies had souls?

It did to Lili. And maybe it did to Jamieson, too, though she'd never have admitted it.

Lili was pale, paler than usual, and she was shaking as they entered the house. But she knew she must do this.

One at a time, she went room to room.

First, to Blair. She stood, with the others behind her, in complete silence. Her glance darted around the room. She closed her eyes, and her arms lifted involuntarily. She stood unmoving for several minutes, like one in a trance.

She opened her eyes and moved forward. Touched Blair on the head. Closed her eyes again. Stayed in the position for some minutes, while the others, standing back in the hallway, became twitchy with impatience. Then she opened her eyes, moved slowly backward out of the room, her gaze sweeping the entire space again.

Next, she went into Charlie's room, repeating the entire performance. Eyes sweeping the room. The touch on the corpse's head. The backward move away and out of the room.

Then Hank. Same thing. No one said anything during this time, hardly daring to breathe, not wanting to crack Lili's concentration.

She backed out of Hank's room.

She turned to Hy and Jamieson.

“There are no souls here.”

Her words were chilling.

“How do you know?” It came from Jamieson as a whisper.

“There is no lingering scent.”

“Scent?” Hy's voice rose on a squeak.

“Souls have a scent. A sweet, lingering scent. But there is no soul lingering here. No scent. No sight. No small pocket of haze in the air. No sense, when I touch, no vibration. No doubt.” Lili's voice was firm.

“There are bodies here, that you can see. But their souls have long gone somewhere better.”

For Hy, this absence of the souls made the bodies creepier, more dead, if that were possible.

“Deader than dead,” she said.

A small smile from Lili. “Yes. More dead than dead.”

“So the…souls…” Jamieson choked out the word. She couldn't believe that she was having this conversation. “The souls have gone? The souls don't care what happens to the bodies?”

“No. They're not using them. They have abandoned them long ago. Only we care what happens to the bodies.”

“Which is how they end up like this. Plastic.”

“I imagine that's when the souls left. It was not possible for them to live in that environment. In plastic. They were driven out. Driven away.”

“To where?” Jamieson.

“I don't know. I don't know where souls go. I don't know where they live in the body. Some say the mind. But where is the mind? We don't know that either. They used to say the soul lived in the heart, or spleen. Or liver, because that's the best-looking organ.” Lili shook her head. “But a soul doesn't need to be good-looking. When the body departs, the soul leaves the body, and goes somewhere better.”

Anywhere would be better than where these bodies were, this house they were in, this house that had evil built in. Was the house itself evil, did it need death and deception to fuel its own existence? It seemed that way, because nothing good had ever happened here. There was an evil that, unlike the souls, would not leave.

The souls were gone. Now the bodies would follow.

Perhaps also to a better place.

The house? It would sit on this spot, as it always had, through decay and transformation, always managing to lure someone else through its doors.

Was it leeching evil into the ground beneath it, from its tainted foundation?

Was this its heritage?

“Evil,” said Lili as they left. “There's only one way to rid it of evil.” She turned back toward the house, looked up and said one word, one word Hy strained to hear, but it was lost on the wind.